


Only the Dead Return

by Someone_aka_Me



Series: in a world that could've left us hard as metal [15]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, POV Second Person, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:22:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2167371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Someone_aka_Me/pseuds/Someone_aka_Me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You say she is a casualty of war.</p>
<p>They do not understand. She died a year after the war ended, they say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only the Dead Return

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissingMommy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissingMommy/gifts).



> Inspired largely by two of Andrea Gibson's poems — For Eli, from which two lines are directly quoted, and The Nutritionist, from which a phrase of four words is quoted. As a point of note, For Eli happens to be Sam's favorite and the Nutritionist is mine.

You say she is a casualty of war.

They do not understand. She died a year after the war ended, they say.

Only the dead return, you say. Only the dead return from the battlefield. The rest remain forever caught between worlds, you say.

She never really came back, after all.

Oh, sure, her body came back. Scarred and broken. She hated it. Said it wasn't her face anymore, even when you told her over and over and over again that she was still beautiful no matter what. Even when you truly believed what you were saying. But it didn't matter what you believed, because she didn't believe it.

Even though her body came back, the rest of her didn't. The part of her that lived and loved was stuck somewhere on that battlefield, or buried with the bodies of the fallen. She was not whole — parts of her were missing.

In the year after the war, she was sometimes empty, sometimes full of rage

She spent days unable to get out of bed, staring at the bullseye of her wrist. She spent days raising her fist at the sky, furious with a world that allowed her to live when so many others had not. It wasn't fair, she said. When was war ever fair? you asked. She had no answer.

She was something you couldn't understand but you loved her anyway, loved her even when she could not love herself, loved her with all of your broken heart.

She was your technicolor Lavender Brown gone monochrome, and it was painful to witness. Even more painful for the fact that you couldn't seem to help her.

Even on the days when she'd come to you saying her skin was loose on her bones and her mind was crawling with demons and you  _tried_ , you tried so hard to help her, holding her tight so that her skin couldn't slip off and the demons would be kept at bay. But you were never enough.

Because the thing that came back from war wasn't Lavender anymore.

She was a casualty of war, no matter what they said.

It just took a year for her body to join her mind.


End file.
